A Quote by Mieczyslaw Jastrun

The solitude of the poet is the uniqueness of his experience, and the particulaity of his sensitivity and imagination.

Mieczyslaw Jastrun

Quote Topics

Experience His His Ex Imagination Poet Sensitivity Solitude Uniqueness

Quote Author

Mieczyslaw Jastrun
Polish - Poet
October 29, 1903 - February 22, 1983

Walt Whitman is the only great modern poet who does not seem to experience discord when he faces his world. Not even solitude - his monologue is a universal chorus.

Octavio Paz

By listening to his language of his locality the poet begins to learn his craft. It is his function to lift, by use of imagination and the language he hears, the material conditions and appearances of his environment to the sphere of the intelligence where they will have new currency.

William Carlos Williams

What his imagination is to the poet, facts are to the historian. His exercise of judgment comes in their selection, his art in their arrangement.

Barbara Tuchman

Much of a poet's experience takes place in imagination only; the life he tells is oftenest the life that he strongly desires to live, and the power, the purity and height of his utterance may not seldom be the greater because experience here uses the voices of desire.

George Edward Woodberry

The poet's function is to make his imagination . . . become the light in the mind of others. His role, in short, is to help people to live their lives.

Wallace Stevens

Mass democracy, mass morality and the mass media thrive independently of the individual, who joins them only at the cost of at least a partial perversion of his instincts and insights. He pays for his social ease with what used to be called his soul - his discriminations, his uniqueness, his psychic energy, his self.

Al Alvarez

The writer cultivates, extends, raises and inflates his imagination, sure that this is his destiny, his usefulness, his contribution to the understanding of good and evil. As he inflates his imagination he inflates his capacity for evil.

John Cheever

You can say the president's private life takes up so much of his time that he doesn't focus on his job, so therefore he's terrible. But in my imagination, the 23 hours of the day that we don't experience, he's very hard at work. He's quite an effective and successful president - in my narcissistic imagination.

Tony Goldwyn

The poet needs a ground in popular tradition on which he may work, and which, again, may restrain his art within the due temperance. It holds him to the people, supplies a foundation for his edifice; and, in furnishing so much work done to his hand, leaves him at leisure, and in full strength for the audacities of his imagination.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

To the poet, his travels, his adventures, his loves, his indignations are finally resolved in verse, and this, in the end becomes his permanent, indestructible life.

William Jay Smith

All a person can do in this life is gather about him his integrity, his imagination, and his individuality – and with these ever with him, out front and in sharp focus, leap into the dance of experience.

Tom Robbins

I believe that the very effort to convert anybody is violence, it is interfering in his individuality, in his uniqueness, into his freedom.

Rajneesh

The poet reminds men of their uniqueness and it is not necessary to possess the ultimate definition of this uniqueness. Even to speculate is a gain.

Norman Cousins

Moscow, Rome, London, Paris stay in place. Leningrad and New York float, spreading all their sails, cutting space with their prows, and can disappear, if not in reality, then in the imagination of the poet creating a myth, a mythical tradition on the grounds of his secret experience.

Nina Berberova

Henry Corbin creates the world - most of all his examination of the imagination and what the imagination was for him. Some philosophers would think of the imagination as a synthetic ability, how you put different things together. Artists more think of the imagination as creativity. So I really like the way that he presents the imagination as a faculty that allows one to experience worlds that are not exactly physical but are real nonetheless.